A viewing of The Turning (or more correctly Tim Winton’s The Turning, ‘the championed Australian film of 2013’) is a singular experience, and one far more enjoyable than I had anticipated. As the title makes clear, the film is an adaption of Tim Winton’s award-winning short story collection of the same name, which has been rendered in film by producer/director Robert Connolly. Connolly, however, is not the only director.

As a way of maintaining Winton’s short story narrative, as well as his enigmatic style, Connolly gathered together 17 other directors—each with their own crew and cast—assigning them all their own story and eventually drawing the short films together to make a whole. The directors were left alone to interpret their allocated stories in their own individual ways and visually recreate what they had gleaned from Winton’s stories. The result is a three-hour collection of loosely interlocking and vaguely connected vignettes, each with its own distinctive cinematic style that explore the lives of those living in the fictional sea-side town of Angelus, Western Australia, over a thirty year period. All are hauntingly beautiful and all are complete films in their own right.